Campbell Corner Language Exchange

Folkloristic Commentary

by Joseph Campbell

as published in The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales
Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library. 1944

Part ONE: The Work of the Brothers Grimm

Frau Katherina Viehmann (1755-1815) was about fifty-five when the young Grimm brothers discovered her. She had married in 1777 a tailor of Niederzwehren, a village near Kassel, and was now a mother and a grandmother. "This woman," Wilhelm Grimm wrote in the preface to the first edition of the second volume (1815), "...has a strong and pleasant face and a clear, sharp look in her eyes; in her youth she must have been beautiful. She retains fast in mind these old sagas--which talent, as she says, is not granted to everyone; for there be many that cannot keep in their heads anything at all. She recounts her stories thoughtfully, accurately, with uncommon vividness and evident delight--first quite easily, but then, if required, over again, slowly, so that with a bit of practice it is possible to take down her dictation, word for word. Much was recorded in this way, and its fidelity is unmistakable. Anyone believing that traditional materials are easily falsified and carelessly preserved, and hence cannot survive over a long period, should hear how close she always keeps to her story and how zealous she is for its accuracy; never does she alter any part in repetition, and she corrects a mistake herself, immediately she notices it. Among people who follow the old life-ways without change, attachment to inherited patterns is stronger than we, impatient for variety, can realize." [1]

It was from such people that Jacob and Wilhelm collected, through a period of years, the materials for their book: simple folk of the farms and villages round about, and in the spinning rooms and beer halls of Kassel. Many stories were received, too, from friends. In the notes it is set down frequently, "From Dortchen Wild in Kassel," or "From Dortchen, in the garden house." Dorothea Wild--later Wilhelm's wife--supplied over a dozen of the stories. Together with her five sisters, she had been grounded in fairylore by an old nurse, die alte Marie. [2] Another family were the Hassenpflugs, who had arrived with a store of tales from Hanau; [3] still another, the von Haxthausens, who resided in Westphalia. [4] The brothers grubbed for materials also in medieval German manuscripts, and in the Folk Books and collections from the time of Luther.

The special distinction of the work of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1785-1863 and 1786-1859) was its scholarly regard for the sources. Earlier collectors had felt free to manipulate folk materials; the Grimms were concerned to let the speech of the people break directly into print. Among the Romantics of the generation just preceding, folk poetry had been venerated profoundly. Novalis had pronounced the folk tale, the primary and highest poetical creation of man. Schiller had written extravagantly:

                                                Tiefere Bedeutung
Liegt in dem Marchen meiner Kinderjahre
    Als in der Wahrheit, die das Leben lehrt. [5]

Sir Walter Scott had collected and studied the balladry of the Scottish border. Wordsworth had sung of the Reaper. Yet no one before the Grimms had really acquiesced to the irregularities, the boorishness, the simplicity, of the folk talk. Anthologists had arranged, restored, and tempered; poets had built new masterpieces out of the rich raw material. But an essentially ethnographical approach, no one had so much as conceived.

The remarkable fact is that the Grimm brothers never developed their idea; they began with it full blown, as young students hardly out of law school. Jacob, browsing in the library of their favorite professor, the jurist Friedrich Karl von Savigny, had chanced on a selection of the German Minnesingers, and almost immediately their life careers had stood before them. Two friends, Clemens Brentano and Ludwig Achim von Arnim, who in 1805 had published, in the Romantic manner, the first volume of a collection of folk song, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, gave the brothers valuable encouragement. Jacob and Wilhelm assisted with the later volumes of the Wunderhorn, and began collecting from their friends. But at the same time, they were seeking out, deciphering, and beginning to edit, manuscripts from the Middle Ages. The book of fairy tales represented only a fraction of their immediate project. It would be, as it were, the popular exhibition hall of an ethnological museum: in the offices upstairs research would be going forward, which the larger public would hardly wish, or know how, to follow.

The program proceeded against odds. In 1806 the armies of Napoleon overran Kassel. "Those days," wrote Wilhelm, "of the collapse of all hitherto existing establishments will remain forever before my eyes...The order with which the studies in Old German were pursued helped overcome the spiritual depression....Undoubtedly the world situation and the necessity to draw in to the peacefulness of scholarship contributed to the reawakening of the long forgotten literature; but not only did we seek something of consolation in the past, our hope, naturally, was that this course of ours should contribute somewhat to the return of a better day." While "foreign persons, foreign manners, and a foreign, loudly spoken language" promenaded the thoroughfares, "and poor people staggered along the streets, being led away to death," the brothers stuck to their work tables, to resurrect the present through the past.

Jacob in 1805 had visited the libraries of Paris; his ability to speak French now helped him to a small clerkship in the War Office. Two of his brothers were in the field with the hussars. Just after his mother's death, in 1808, he was appointed auditor to the state council and superintendent of the private library of Jerome Buonoparte, the puppet king of Westphalia. Thus he was freed from economic worry, but had considerable to do. Volume one of the Nursery and Household Tales appeared the winter of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow (1812); two years later, in the midst of the work on volume two, Jacob was suddenly dispatched to Paris to demand restitution of his city's library, which had been carried away by the French. Then in 1816, after attending the congress of Vienna as secretary of legation, he was again dispatched, to reclaim another treasure of books. He found the predicament not a little awkward. The librarian, Langlès, seeming him studying manuscripts in the Bibliothèque, protested with indignation: "Nous ne devons plus souffrir ce Monsieur Grimm, qui vient tous les jours travailler ici et qui nous enlève pourtant nos manuscripts."

Wilhelm was never as vigorous and positive as Jacob, but eh more gay and gentle. During the years of the collection he suffered from a severe heart disorder, which for days riveted him to his room. The two were together all their lives. As children they had slept in the same bed and worked at the same table; as students they had had two beds and tables in the same room. Even after Wilhelm's marriage to Dortchen Wild, in 1825, Uncle Jacob shared the house, "and in such harmony and community that one might almost imagine the children were common property." [6] Thus it is difficult to say, with respect to their work, where Jacob ended and Wilhelm began.

The engraved portraits of the brothers reveal two very good looking youths, clear eyed, with delicately modeled features. Wilhelm's forehead is the larger, his chin the sharper, his eyes look out from arched, slightly nettled brows. With firmer jaw Jacob watches, and a sturdier, more relaxed poise. His hair is a shade the darker, the less curled and tousled. Their mouths, well shaped, are identical. Both are shown with the soft, flaring, highly-stocked collars and the wind-blown hair-trim of the period. They are alert, sharp nosed, sensitive nostriled, and immediately interest the eye.

In the labor on the fairy tales Jacob supplied, apparently, the greater initiative, the stricter demands for scholarly precision, and a tireless zeal for collecting. Wilhelm toiled over the tales with sympathetic devotion, and with exquisite judgment in the patient task of selecting, piecing together, and arranging. As late as 1809, they had considered the advisability of turning over the manuscripts to Brentano. But Jacob mistrusted their friend's habit of reworking traditional materials--shooting them full of personal fantasy, cutting, amplifying, recombining brilliantly, and always flavoring the contemporary palate. He complained of the mishandling of the texts of the Wunderhorn. The poet, however, thought the scholar a little dull, and exhibited no interest whatsoever in the ideal of the chaste historical record. Achim von Arnim, on the other hand, aided and advised. Though he strove to persuade Jacob to relent a little, here and there, he did not reject the brothers when they insisted on their program. It was he who found a printer for the collection, Georg Andreas Reimer, in Berlin.

Volume one came out at Christmas time, with a dedication to Bettina, the wife of Achim von Arnim, for her little son, Johannes Freimund. In Vienna the book was banned as a work of superstition; but elsewhere, in spite of the political tension of the times, it was eagerly received. Clemens Brentano declared that he found the unimproved materials slovenly and often very boring; others complained of the impropriety of certain of the tales; newspaper reviews were few and cold. Nevertheless, the book enjoyed immediate success, and prospered. The Brothers Grimm had produced, in an unpredicted way, the masterpiece which the whole Romantic movement in Germany had been intending.

Von Arnim wrote to Wilhelm with quiet satisfaction: "You have collected propitiously, and have sometimes right propitiously helped; which, of course, you don't let Jacob know..." Not all the tales had come from such talented heads as that of the story-wife of Niederzwehren. Some had been rather garbled. Many had been relayed by friends, and had lost flavor. A few had been found in fragments, and these had had to be matched. But Wilhelm had kept note of his adjustments; and their end had been, not to embellish, but to bring out the lines of the story which inferior informant had obscured. Furthermore, throughout the later editions, which appeared from year to year, the work of the careful, loving, improving hand could be increasingly discerned. Wilhelm's method, as contrasted with the procedures of the Romantics, was inspired by his increasing familiarity with the popular modes of speech. He noted carefully the words that the people preferred to use and their typical manners of descriptive narrative, and then very carefully going over the story-texts, as taken from this or that raconteur, he chiseled away the more abstract, literary, or colorless turns and fitted in such characteristic, rich phrases, as he had gathered from the highways and the byways. Jacob at first demurred. But it was clear that the stories were gaining immensely by the patient devotion of the younger brother; and since Jacob, anyhow, was becoming involved in his grammatical studies, he gradually released to Wilhelm the whole responsibility. Even the first edition of volume two was largely in the hands of Wilhelm; thereafter the work was completely his.

Volume two appeared in January, 1815, the brothers having received assistance from all sides. "The two of us gathered the first volume alone," Wilhelm wrote to a friend, "quite by ourselves and hence very slowly, over a period of six years; now things are going much better and more rapidly." The second edition was issued, 1819, improved and considerably enlarged, and with an introduction by Wilhelm, "On the Nature of Folk Tales." Then, in 1822, appeared a third volume--a work of commentary, compiled partly from the notes of the earlier editions, but containing additional matter, as well as a thoroughgoing comparative-historical study. [7] The brothers published a selection of fifty favorites in 1825, and in 1837 released a third edition of the two volume original, again amplified and improved. Still further betterments were to be noted in the editions of 1840, 1843, 1850, 1857. Translations in Danish, Swedish, and French came almost immediately; presently in Dutch, English, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Finnish, Esthonian, Hebrew, Armenian, and Esperanto. Tales borrowed from the Grimm collection have since been recorded among the natives of Africa, Mexico, and the South Seas.

Part TWO: The Types of Story

The first effect of the work was a transformation throughout the world of the scholarly attitude toward the productions of the folk. A new humility before the informant becomes everywhere perceptible after the date, 1812. Exactitude, not beautification, becomes thereafter the first requirement, "touching up" the unforgivable sin. Furthermore, the number and competence of the collectors greatly and rapidly increased. Field-workers armed with pad and pencil marched forth to every corner of the earth. Solid volumes today stand ranged along the shelf from Switzerland, Frisia, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and the Faroes, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Italy, Corsica, Malta, Portugal and Spain, the Basques, the Rhaeto-Romanic mountaineers, the modern Greeks, Rumanians, Albanians, Slovenes, Serb-Croatians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Czechs, Slovacs, Serbs and Poles, Great, White and Little Russians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Finns, Lapps and Esthonians, Cheremiss, Mordvinians, Votyaks and Syryenians, Gipsies and Hungarians, Turks, Kasan-Tatars, Chuvash and Bashkirs, Kalmuks, Buryats, Voguls and Ostyaks, Yakuts, Siberian Tatars, the peoples of the Caucasus, the populations of India and Iran, Mesopotamia, Syria, the Arabian desert, Tibet, Turkestan, Java and Sumatra, Borneo, the Celebes, the Philippines, Burma, Siam, Annam, China, Korea and Japan, Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, the continent of Africa, South, Middle and North America. Still unpublished archives accumulate in provincial, national, and international institutes. Where there was a lack, there is now such abundance that the problem is how to deal with it, how to get the mind around it, and what to think.

In this ocean of story, a number of kinds of narrative are encompassed. Many of the collections of so-called primitive materials include Myths; that is to say, religious recitations conceived as symbolic of the play of Eternity in Time. These are rehearsed, not for diversion, but for the spiritual welfare of the individual or community. Legends also appear; i.e. reviews of a traditional history (or of episodes from such a history) so rendered as to permit mythological symbolism to inform human event and circumstance. Whereas myths present in pictorial form cosmogonic and ontological institutions, legends refer to the more immediate life and setting of the given society. [8] Something of the religious power of myth may be regarded as effective in legend, in which case, the native narrator must be careful concerning the circumstances of his recitations, lest the power break astray. Myths and legends may furnish entertainment incidentally, but they are essentially tutorial.

Tales, on the other hand, are frankly pastime: fireside tales, winternights' tales, nursery tales, coffee-house tales, sailor yarns, pilgrimage and caravan tales to pass the endless nights and days. The most ancient written records and the most primitive tribal circles attest alike to man's hunger for the good story. And every kind of thing has served. Myths and legends of an earlier period, now discredited or no longer understood, their former power broken (yet still potent to charm), have supplied much of the raw material for what now passes simply as Animal Tale, Fairy Tale, and Heroic or Romantic Adventure. The giants, and gnomes of the Germans, the "little people" of the Irish, the dragons, knights and ladies of Arthurian Romance, were once the gods and demons of the Green Isle and the European continent. Similarly, the divinities of the primitive Arabians appear as Jinn in the story-world of Islam. Tales of such origin are regarded with differing degrees of seriousness by the various people who recount them; and they can be received by the sundry members of the audience, severally, with superstitious awe, nostalgia for the days of belief, ironic amusement, or simple delight in the marvels of imagination and intricacies of plot. But no matter what the atmosphere of belief, the stories, in so far as they now are "Tales," are composed primarily for amusement. They are reshaped in terms of dramatic contrast, narrative suspense, repetition, [9] and resolution.

Certain characteristic opening and closing formulas set apart from the common world the timeless, placeless realm of faerie: "Once upon a time"; "In the days of good King Arthur"; "A thousand years ago tomorrow"; "Long, long ago when Brahmadatta was the ruler of Benares"-- "And so they lived happily ever after"; "That's all"; "A mouse did run, the story is done"; "So there they remain, happy and contented, while we stand barefoot as packasses and lick our teeth"; "Bo bow bended, my story's ended; if you don't like it, you may mend it." A handsome conclusion is attributed dot the Zanzibar Swahili: "If the story was beautiful, the beauty belongs to us all; if it was bad, the fault is nine only, who told it."[10]

Prose is the normal vehicle of story, but at critical points little rhymes commonly appear:

Looking-glass, Looking-glass, on the wall,
Who in this land is the fairest of all?

Turn back, turn back, young maiden dear,
'Tis a murderer's house you enter here.

Peace, peace, my dear little giants,
I have had a thought of ye,
Something I have brought for ye.

Little duck, little duck, dost thou see,
Hansel and Gretel are waiting for thee?
There's never a plank, or bridge in sight,
Take us across on thy back so white.

In Arabian tales, and less commonly European, the prose of the text slips momentarily into rhyme: "Thereupon sat a lady bright of blee, with brow beaming brilliantly, the dream of philosophy, whose eyes were fraught with Babel's gramarye and her eyebrows were arched as for archery"; "They all lived happy and died happy, and never drank out of a dry cappy"; "Now I had an army of a thousand thousand bridles, men of warrior mien with forearms strong and keen, armed with spears and mail-coats sheen and swords that gleam."

In the lovely French medieval chante-fable, Aucassin et Nicolette, verse passages regularly alternate with prose. In the Bardic Lays that served to entertain the heroes in the mead-hall, in the long Epics woven in later times, and in the Ballads of the folk, narrative goes into verse entirely. The spell of rhythm and rhyme is the spell of "once upon a time." [11]

"And as the cup went round merrily, quoth the Porter to the Kalandars: 'And you, O brothers mine, have ye no story or rare adventure to amuse us withal?'"--The empty hour is as gladly filled with a good personal adventure as with a fragment of traditional wonder. Hence, the world of actual life as caught in Anecdote, paced and timed to fix and justify attention, has contributed to the great category of the Tale. The anecdote may range from the ostensibly truthful, or only slightly exaggerated, to the frankly unbelievable. In the latter range it mingles readily with sheer Invention: the Joke, Merry Tale, and Ghost Adventure. Again, it can unite with the mythological stuff of traditional romance, and thus acquire some of the traits of legend.

A distinct and relatively recently developed category is the Fable. The best example are the Greek and Medieval collections attributed to "Aesop," and the Oriental of the Brahmins, Buddhists, and Jains. The Fable is didactic. It is not, like Myth, a revelation of transcendental mysteries, but a clever illustration of a political or ethical point. Fables are witty, and not to be believed but understood. [12]

Under the single heading, Marchen, the Germans popularly comprehended the whole range of the Folk Tale. The Brothers Grimm, therefore, included in their collection folk stories of every available variety. Scholars since their day have analyzed the assortment and classified the tales according to type.

* These types are I. Animal Tales II. Ordinary Folk Tales, following under subcategories of A. Tales of Magic B. Religious Tales C. Novelle (Romantic Tales) D. Tales of the Stupid Ogre, III. Jokes and Anecdotes. For the list of the Brothers Grimm, please see p.844-845 in The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales published by Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library, copyright 1972 under Random House.

Part THREE: The History of the Tales

The patterns of the folk tale are much the same throughout the world. This circumstance has given rise to a long and intricate learned discussion. [13] By and large, it is now fairly agreed that the general continuity, and an occasional correspondence to the detail, can be referred ot thee psychological unity of the human species, but that over this ground a profuse and continuous passing along of tales from mouth to ear--and by book--has been taking place, not for centuries only, but millenniums, and over immense reaches of the globe. Hence the folklore of each area must be studied for it peculiar history. Every story--every motif, in fact--has had its adventurous career.

The Grimm brothers regarded European folklore as the detritus of Old Germanic belief: the myths of ancient time had disintegrated, first into heroic legend and romance, last into these charming treasures of the nursery. But in 1859, the year of Wilhelm's death, a Sanskrit scholar, Theodor Benfey, demonstrated that a great portion of the lore of Europe had come, through Arabic, Hebrew and Latin translations, directly from India--and this as late as the thirteenth century A.D. [14] Since Benfey's time, the evidence for a late, polygenetic development of the folk tale of Christian Europe has become abundant and detailed.

The scholars of the English Anthropological School at the close of the nineteenth century (E.B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, E.S. Hartland, and others), believed that thee irrational elements of fairylore were grounded in savage superstition. Totemism, cannibalism, taboo, and the external soul, they discovered on every page. But today it is clear that such irrationalities are as familiar to modern European dream-life as to society on the Congo, and so we are no longer disposed to run a tale back to the paleolithic caves simply because the heroine marries a gazelle or eats her mother. Yet in a few of the stories of the Grimm collection actual vestiges of primitive ways can be identified with reasonable assurance; [15] and in perhaps half a dozen other signs persist form the barbaric period of the Migrations. [16]

A crisis in thee history of the European folk tradition becomes apparent, about the tenth century A.D. A quantity of Late Classical matter was being imported from the Mediterranean by the itinerant entertainers, minstrels and pranksters, who came swarming from the sunny south to infest the pilgrim routes and present themselves at castle doors. [17] And not only minstrels, missionaries too were at work. The fierce, warrior ideals of earlier story were submitting to a new piety and sentimental didactic: Slandered Virtue is triumphant, Patience is rewarded, Love endures.

There seems to have prevailed a comparative poverty of invention until the twelfth century, when the matter of India and the matter of Ireland found their ways to the fields of Europe. This was the period of the Crusades and the Chivalrous Romance, the former opening Europe wide to thee civilization of the Orient, the latter conjuring from the realm of Celtic faerie a wild wonderworld of princesses enchanted in sleep, castles solitary in the forest adventurous, dragons steaming in rimy caverns, Merlin-magic, Morgan le Fay, cackling hags transmuted by a kiss into the damsel of the world. Europe inherited nearly everything of its fairyland from the imagination of the Celt. [18]

Shortly after this time came the Hindu Panchatantra. The work had been translated from Sanskrit into Persian in the sixth century A.D., from Persian into Arabic in the eighth, and from Arabic into Hebrew, around the middle of the thirteenth. About 1270, John of Capua turned the Hebrew into Latin, and from this Latin version the book passed into German and Italian. A Spanish translation had been made from the Arabic in 1251; an English was later drawn form the Italian. Individual stories became popular in Europe, and were then rapidly assimilated. "Out of the literary works," wrote Benfey, "the tales went to the people, and from the people they went to the people again, etc., and it was principally through this cooperative action that they achieved national and individual spirit--that quality of national validity and individual unity which contributes to not a few of them their high poetical worth." [19]

A wonderful period opened in the thirteenth century. With the passing of the gallant days of the great crusades, the aristocratic taste for verse romance declined, and the lusty prose of the late medieval towns moved into its own. Prose compendiums of traditional lore began appearing, filled with every kind of gathered anecdote and history of wonder--vast, immeasurable compilations, which the modern scholar has hardly explored. A tumbling, broad, inexhaustible flood of popular merry tales, misadventures, hero, saint, and devil legends, animal fables, mock heroics, slap-stick jokes, riddles, pious allegories and popular ballads burst abruptly into manuscript and carried everything before it. Compounded with themes from the Cloister and the Castle, mixed with elements from the bible and from the heathenness of the Orient, as well as the deep pre-Christian past, the wonderful hurly-burly broke into the stonework in humorous grotesque in and out of the letters of illuminated manuscripts, appeared in tapestries, on saddles and weapons, on trinket-caskets, mirrors and combs. [20] This was the first major flourishing in Europe of a literature of the people. From right and left the materials came, to the left and right they were flung forth again, sealed with the sign of the late Gothic; so that no matter what the origin, they were now the re-creation of the European folk.

Much of this matter found its way into the literary works of the late Middle Ages, thee Reformation and Renaissance (Boccaccio, Chaucer, Hans Sachs, Les cent nouvelles nouvelles, etc.) and then back, reshaped, to the people. The period of abundance continued to the time of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648).

Finally, in France, at the court of Louis XIV, a vogue commenced for the delicate refashioning of fairy tales and fables--inspired, in part by a new French translation of a late Persian rendering of the Arabian Panchatantra, part by Antoine Galland's rendition of the Arabian Thousand Nights and One Night. The pastime yielded a plentiful harvest of freshly wrought, delicate pieces (La Fontaine, Perrault, the forty-one volumes of the Cabinet des Fees). Many were taken over by the people and crossed the Rhine.

So that by that time the Grimm brothers arrived to began their collection, much material had overlain the remote mythology of the early tribes. Tales from thee four quarters, inventions from every level of society and all stages of Western history were commingled. Nevertheless, as they observed, a homogeneity of style and character pervades the total inheritance. A continuous process of re-creation, a kind of spiritual metabolism, has so broken the original structures in assimilating them to the living civilization, that only the most meticulous and skillful observation, analysis and comparative research can discover their provenience and earlier state. The Grimm brothers regarded this rich composition as a living unity and sought to probe its past; the modern scientist , on the other hand, searches the unit for its elements, then ferrets these to their remote sources. From the contemporary work we receive a more complex impression of the processes of culture than was possible in the period of the Grimms.

Let us turn, therefore, to the problem of the individual tale--the migratory element that enters our system and becomes adapted to our style of existence. What is its history? What can happen to it during the course of its career?

Passing from Orient to occident, surviving the revolutions of history and the long attrition of time, traversing the familiar bounds of language and belief--the favorite now of a Saracen king, now of a hand warrior, now of a Capucian monk, now of old Marie--the tale undergoes kaleidoscopical mutations. The first problem of research is to identify, fix, an characterize the key-complex, the formal principle of thee story's entity, that without which thee story would not be. As the story then is followed throughout its peregrination, it is observed to assimilate to itself the materials offered from land ot land. It changes, like a chameleon; puts on the colors of its background; lives and shapes itself to the requirements of the moment. "Such a tale," writes an American authority, "is at the same time a definite entity and an abstraction. it is an entity in the particular form in which it happens to be recorded at any moment; it is an abstraction in the sense that no two versions ever exactly agree and that consequently the tale lives only in endless mutations." [21]

In the life-course of any given version of a tale, a number of typical accidents may occur. A detail may be forgotten. A foreign trait may become naturalized, an obsolete modernized. A general term (animal) may become specialized (mouse), or, vice versa, a special generalized. The order of events may be rearranged. The personages may become confused, or thee acts confused, or in some other way the traits of the story may cross-influence each other. Persons and things may become multiplied (particularly by the numbers 3, 5, and 7). Many animals may replace one (polyzoism). Animals may assume human shape (anthropomorphism), or vice versa. Animals may become demons, or vice versa. The narrator can appear as hero (egomorphism). Further: the story may be amplified with new materials. Such materials are generally derived form other folk tales. The expansion may take place at any point, but the beginning and end are the most likely to be amplified. Several tales can be joined into one. Finally: the inventiveness of an individual narrator may lead to intentional variations--for better or for worse. [22]

The serious study of popular story began, in Europe, with the Romantics. With the Grimm brothers the science came of age. With the foundation in Helsingfors, in 1907, of the Finnish society of the "Folklore Fellows," the now colossal subject was coordinated for systematic research over the entire world. The technique of the Geographic-Historical Method, perfected by the associates of this pivotal group, [23] enables the modern scholar to retrace the invisible path of the spoken tale practically to the doorstep of the inventor--over the bounds of states, languages, continents, even across oceans and around the globe. The work has required the cooperation of the scholars of the five continents; the international distribution of the materials has demanded an international research. yet thee work started in the usual way of folklore studies, as a labor of local, patriotic pride.

About the middle of the nineteenth century, a strong nationalist movement had begun to mature in Finland. Buffeted for five hundred years between Sweden and Russia, the little nation had been annexed in 1809, by Czar Alexander I. Since the close of the eighteenth century, Swedish had been the official academic language. A group of young patriotis now began to agitate for the restoration of the native spirit and the native tongue.

Elias Lonnrot (1802-1884), a country physician and student of Finnish philology, collected ballads and folk tales among the people. His work was a northern echo of the labors of the Brothers Grimm. Having gathered a considerable body of folk poetry around the legendary heroes, Vainamoinen, Ilmarinen, Lemminkainen, and Kullervo, he composed these in coordinated sequence and cast them in a uniform verse. 1835 he thus published the first edition of what has since become known s the folk-epic of Finland, the Kalevala, "The Land of Heroes." [24]

Julius Krohn (1835-1888), the first student at the university to presume to present his graduate thesis in Finnish, devoted himself to the study of the folk tradition, and in particular to the materials gathered by Lonnrot in the Kalevala. He discovered that among the ballads and popular stories of the Swedes, Russians, Germans, Tatars, etc., many of the motifs of Lonnrot's epic reappeared, but in variant combinations. The Kalevala, therefore, could not be studied all of a piece; its elements had to be traced down separately. With this discovery he took the first step toward the development of the Finnish geographic-historical method.

Julius Krohn next found that not all the Finnish examples of a given them could be compared trait for trait with the foreign versions; only what seemed to him to be the oldest of the Finnish forms closely resembled those of the neighboring lands. He concluded that the materials of the native epic had entered Finland from without and had undergone within the country gradual modification.

Furthermore and finally, Julius Krohn perceived that each of the native modifications seemed to be limited in its geographical distribution. He took care, therefore, to keep precise note of the geographical sources as well as chronological relationships of his materials. In this way he was enabled to study the transformation of the motifs of a tale in its passage from mouth to mouth over the land and through the years. "First I sift and arrange the different variants according to chronology and topography," he wrote to the Hungarian philologist, P. Hunfalvy in 1884; "because I have discovered that only in this way is it possible to distinguish the original elements from the later additions." [25]

With respect to the Kalevala, Julius Krohn concluded that neither was it a very old legend nor were its materials originally Finnish. The narrative elements had arrived on the waves of a culture tide that had streamed over Europe through the centuries. Stemming from the gardens of the East and the fertile valleys of Antiquity, they had crossed southern Europe--largely by word of mouth-- then turned eastward again to the regions of the Slavs and Tatars, whence they had passed to the peoples of the north. [26] And as each folk had received, it had developed, reinterpreted and amplified, and then handed along thee inheritance to the neighbor.

Thus in Finland, as in Germany, what had begun as the study of a national, developed inevitably into the review of an international tradition. And thee scholarship that had started in patriotic fervor opened immediately into a worldwide collaboration. The son of Julius Krohn, Kaarle Krohn, applied the geographical method developed by his father to the special problem of the folk tale, [27] and it was he who in 1907, in collaboration with German and Scandinavian scholars, founded the research society that since his time has coordinated the work of many regions.

To illustrate the manner in which the research has been carried on:

An index of folk tale types was issued in 1911 by Antti Aarne. [28] (The types distinguished in this basic study are those indicated above, pp. 844-845, for the varieties of story in the Grimm collection.) Each class was subdivided, and under each head appeared a directory of examples. Coordinated to Aarne's index then were published a series of special catalogues for a number of folk traditions: Finnish, Esthonian, Finnish-Swedish, Flemish, Norwegian, Lapp, Livonian, Rumanian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Spanish and Prussian. For each culture all the available tales form the various published and unpublished archives were classified according to the principles of Aarne's index. Thus an order was beginning to be brought into fluid chaos.

Another type of work undertaken was that of the monograph. A monograph is a special study devoted to the tracing of a single tale through its twists and turns, disappearances and reappearances, over the globe and through the corridors of time. The technique for the preparation of such a work has been described as follows:

"1) The scholar undertaking to write a monograph on any folk narrative (folk tale, saga, legend, anecdote), must know all the extant versions ('variants') of this narrative, whether printed or unprinted, and no matter what the language in which they appear.

"2) He must compare all these versions, carefully, trait by trait, and without any previously formed opinion.

"3) During the investigation, he must always keep in mind the place and time of the rendering of each of the variants." [29]

"The homeland of any given folk tale can generally be judged to be the region in which thee richest harvest of variants appears; furthermore, where the structure of the tale is most consistent, and where customs and beliefs may serve to illuminate the meaning of the tale. The farther a folk tale wanders from its home, the greater the damage to its configurations." [30]

The researches of the Finnish folklore school were supported and extended by an originally independent enterprise in Germany. In 1898 Professor Herman Grimm, the son of Wilhelm, turned over to Johannes Bolte (1858-1937) the unpublished materials of his father and his uncle,, with the hope that a new edition might be prepared of the Commentaries to the Nursery and Household Tales. These commentaries had first appeared as appendices to the volumes of 1812 and 1815, then as a special volume in 1822, and finally in a third edition, 1856. Professor Bolte collated, trait by trait, with all the tales and variants gathered by the Grimms everything that could be drawn from the modern archives. He enlisted in the enterprise Professor Georg Polivka of Prag, who assisted in the analysis of the Slavic analogues. During the course of the next thirty-four years the opus grew to five closely printed volumes. The original work of the Grimms, which had opened a rich century of folk studies, collection and interpretation, was brought by this labor to stand securely in the mid-point of the modern field. The Nursery and Household Tales are to-day, as they were the first moment they left the press, the beginning and the middle, if nowise the end, of the study of the literature of the people.

Part FOUR: The Question of Meaning

The Grimm Brothers, Max Müller, Andrew Lang, and others, have pointed out that folk tales are "monstrous, irrational and unnatural," both as to the elements of which they are composed, and as to the plots that unify these elements. Since a tale may have a different origin from its elements, two questions propose themselves: What is the origin and meaning of the motifs? What is the origin and meaning of the tales?

a) The Motifs

Many of the incidents of the merry tales, jokes, yarns, tall stories and anecdotes are simply comical and clever inventions spun from life. These offer no problem.

The "monstrous, irrational and unnatural" incidents, however, are of a kind with those of myth; indeed, they are frequently derived from myth. They must be explained as myth is explained. But then, how is myth explained?

The reply varies according to the authority:

Euhemerus, a Greek writer of the fourth century B.C., noting that Alexander the Great, shortly after his death, was already appearing in legend as a demi-god, propounded the view that the gods are only great mortals, deified. Snorri Sturleson (1179-1241), in the preface to his Prose Edda, explained in the same way the pagan divinities of the Norse. This theory, called "Euhemerism," has its advocates to this day.

Among the Indo-Germanic philologists in the period of the ascendancy of Max Müller, it was believed that myths were originally sentimental descriptions of nature. Man half consciously read the tragedy of his own life in the birth of the sun, its "kissing of the dew to death," its culmination, descent, and disappearance into the arms of night. Due to the act that Indo-European nouns are either masculine or feminine, the descriptions tended to personify their objects. And due to the fact that the language was evolving, the original references of the personifying nouns were presently forgotten, so that the words were finally taken to be personal names. [31] For example, such a metaphorical name for the sun as Kephalos, the "Head" (of light), presently lost its meaning and was thought to refer to a human youth; and correspondingly, the fading dew, Prokris, bride of the "head," became a mortal girl of tragical demise. One more step: the names might became confused with those of actual historical heroes, whereupon the myth would be transformed into a legend. [32]

Müller's theory was the most elaborate attempt to account for the mechanics of personification. Among the "Anthropologists" it was, more easily, simply assumed that savages and poets tend to attribute souls to things and to personify. [33] The childlike fantasy of primitive man, his poetic feeling and morbid, dream-ridden imagination, played into his attempts to describe and explain the world around him, and thus produced a phantasmagoric counterworld. But the savage's effort, at the core, was to discover the causes of things, and then, through spells, prayer, sacrifice, and sacrament, to control them. Mythology, therefore, was only a false etiology; ceremonial a misguided technology. With the gradual, unmethodical, but nevertheless inevitable recognition of error upon error, man progressed through the labyrinth of wonder to the clearer headed stand of to-day. [34]

Another view (and it rather supplemented than contradicted the descriptive-etiological theory) represented primitive man as terrified by the presences of the grace, hence ever anxious to propitiate and turn them away. The roots of myth and ritual went down to the black subsoil of the grave-cult and fear of death. [35]

A fourth viewpoint was propounded by the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. He argued that the collective superexcitation (surexcitation) of clan, tribal, and intertribal gatherings was experienced by every participating member of the group pas an impersonal, infectious power (mana); and this power would be thought to emanate from the clan or tribal emblem (totem); and this emblem, therefore, would be set apart from all other objects as filled with mana (sacred vs. profane). This totem, this first cult object, would then infect with mana all associated objects, and through this contagion there would come into being a system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, uniting in a single moral community all believers. [36] The great contribution of Durkheim's theory, and what set it apart from all that had gone before, was that it represented religion not as a morbid exaggeration, false hypothesis, or unenlightened fear, but as a truth emotionally experienced, the truth of the relationship of the individual to the group.

This recognition by Durkheim of a kind of truth at the root of the image-world of myth is supported, expanded, and deepened, by the demonstration of the psychoanalysts that dreams are precipitations of unconscious desires, ideals, and fears, and furthermore, that the images of dreams resemble--broadly, but then frequently to the detail--the motifs of folk talk and myth. Having selected for their study the symbol-inventing, myth-motif-producing level of the psyche--source of all those universal themes ("Elementary Ideas") which men have read into the phenomena of nature, into the shadows of the tomb, the lives of the heroes, and the emblems of society--, the psychoanalysts have undoubtedly touched the central moment of the multifarious problem. In the light of their discussion, theories which before seemed mutually contradictory become easily coordinated. Man, nature, death, society--these have served simply as fields into which dream-meanings have been projected. Hence the references of the wild motifs are not really (no matter what the rationalizing consciousness may believe) to the sun, the moon, the stars--the wind and thunder--the grave--the hero--or even the power of the group, but through these, back again to a state of the psyche. Mythology is psychology, misread as cosmology, history, and biography.

A still further step can and must be taken, however, before we still have reached the bounds of the problem. Myth, as the psychoanalysts declare, is not a mess of errors; myth is a picture language. But the language has to be studied to be read. In the first place, this language is the native speech of dream. But in the second place, it has been studied, clarified, and enriched by the poets, prophets, and visionaries of untold millenniums. Dante, Aquinas and Augustness, al-Ghazali and Mahomet, Zarathustra, Shankaracharya, Nagarjuna, and T'ai Tsung, were not bad scientists making misstatements about the weather, or neurotics reading dreams into the stars, but masters of the human spirit teaching a wisdom of death and life. And the thesaurus of the myth-motifs was their vocabulary. They brooded on the state and way of man, and through their broodings came to wisdom; then teaching, with the aid of the picture-language of myth, they worked changes on the pattern of their inherited iconographies.

But not only in the higher cultures, even among the so-called primitives, priests, wizards, and visionaries interpret and re-interpret myth as symbolic of "the Way": "the Pollen Path of Beauty," as it is called, for example, among the Navaho. And this Way, congenial to the wholeness of man, is understood as the little portion of the great Way that binds the cosmos; for, as among the Babylonians, so everywhere, the crux of mythological teaching has always been that "an everlasting reiteration of unchanging principles and events takes place both in space and in time, in large as in small." [37] The Way of the individual is the microcosmic reiteration of the Way of the All and of each. In this sense, the reasnonings of the sages are not only psychological but metaphysical. They are not easily grasped. And yet they are the subtle arguments that inform the iconographies of the world.

Myths, therefore, as they now come to us, and as they break up to let their pregnant motifs scatter and settle into the materials of popular tale, are the purveyors of a wisdom that has borne the race of man through the long vicissitudes of his career. "The content of folklore," writes Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "is metaphysics. Our inability to see this is due primarily to our abysmal ignorance of metaphysics and its technical terms." [38]

Therefore, in sum: The "monstrous, irrational and unnatural" motifs of folk tale and myth are derived from the reservoirs of dream and vision. On the dream level such images represent the total state of the individual dreaming psyche. But clarified of personal distortions and profounded--by poets, prophets, visionaries--, they become symbolic of the spiritual norm for Man the Microcosm. They are thus phrases from an image-language, expressive of metaphysical, psychological, and sociological truth. And in the primitive, oriental, archaic, and medieval societies this vocabulary was pondered and more or less understood. Only in the wake of the Enlightenment has it suddenly lost its meaning and been pronounced insane.

b) The Tales

The folk tale, in contrast to the myth, is a form of entertainment. The story teller fails or succeeds in proportion to the amusement he affords. his motifs may be plucked from the tree of myth, but his craft is never precisely of the mythological order. His productions have to be judged, at last, not as science, sociology, psychology, or metaphysics, but as art--and specifically, art produced by individuals at discoverable periods, in discoverable lands. We have to ask: What principles of craftsmanship inspired the narrators who gave shape to these stories in the long reaches of the past?

The Indian, Celtic, Arabian, and Medieval masters of narrative to whom we owe the most exquisite of our European tales were the practitioners of a craft that strove to reveal through mortal things the brilliance of eternal forms. [39] The quality of their work was not a naturalistical, but a spiritual precision, and their power, "Instructive Wonder." To us there may seem to be little distinction between such a craft and metaphysics; for we have enlarged the connotation of our term, "metaphysical," to include everything untranslatable into positivistic discourse. But peoples of the pre-modern type, whether gothic, oriental, archaic, totemistic, or primitive, typically took for granted the operation of a transcendent energy in the forms of space and time. It was required of every artist, no matter what his craft, that his product should show its sign of the spirit, as well as serve its mechanical end. The function of the craft of the tale, therefore, was not simply to fill the vacant hour, but to fill it with symbolic fare. And since symbolization is the characteristic pleasure of the human mind, the fascination of the tale increased in proportion to the richness of its symbolic content.

By an ironic paradox of time, the playful symbolism of the folk tale--a product of the vacant hour--today seems to us more true, more powerful to survive, than the might and weight of myth. For, whereas the symbolic figures of mythology were regarded (by all except the most sophisticated of the metaphysicians) not as symbolic figures at all but as actual divinities to be invoked, placated, loved and feared, the personages of the tale were comparatively unsubstantial. They were cherished primarily for their fascination. Hence, when the acids of the modern spirit dissolved the kingdoms of the gods, the tales in their essence were hardly touched. The elves were less real than before; bu the tales, by the same token, the more alive. So that we may say that out of the whole symbol-building achievement of the past, what survives to us today (hardly altered in efficiency or in function) is the tale of wonder.

The tale survives, furthermore, not simply as a quaint relic of days childlike in belief. Its world of magic is symptomatic of fevers deeply burning in the psyche: permanent presences, desires, fears, ideals, potentialities, that have glowed in the nerves, hummed in the blood, baffled the senses, since the beginning. The one psyche is operative in both the figments of this vision-world and the deeds of human life. In some manner, then, the latter must stand prefigured in the former. History is the promise of Marchen realized through, and against the obstacles of, space and time. Playful and unpretentious as the archetypes of fairy tale may appear to be, they are the heroes and villains who have built the world for us. The debutante combing her hair before the glass, the mother pondering the future of a son, the laborer in the mines, the merchant vessel full of cargo, the ambassador with portfolio, the soldier in the field of war--all are working in order that the ungainsayable specifications of effective fantasy, the permanent patterns of the tale of wonder, shall be clothed in flesh and known as life.

And so we find that in those masterworks of the modern day which are of a visionary, rather than of a descriptive order, the forms long known from the nursery tale reappear, but now in adult maturity. While the Frazers and the Müllers were scratching their necks to invent some rational explanation for the irrational patterns of fairy lore, Wagner was composing his Ring of the Nibelung, Strindberg and Ibsen their symbolical plays, Nietzsche his Zarathustra, Melville his Moby Dick. Goethe had long completed the Faust, Spenser his Faerie Queene. To-day the novels of James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and many another, as well as the poems of every season, tell us that the gastric fires of human fantasy still are potent to digest raw experience and assimilate it to the creative genius of man. In these productions again, as in the story world of the past which they continue and in essence duplicate, the denotation of the symbols is human destiny: destiny recognized, for all its cannibal horrors, as a marvelous, wild, "monstrous, irrational and unnatural" wondertale to fill the void. This is the story our spirit asked for; this is the story we receive.

Through the vogues of literary history, the folk tale has survived. Told and retold, losing here a detail, gaining there a new hero, disintegrating gradually in outline, but re-created occasionally by some narrator of the folk, the little masterpiece transports into the living present a long inheritance of story-skill, coming down from the romancers of the Middle Ages, the strictly disciplined poets of the Celts, the professional story-men of Islam, and the exquisite, fertile, brilliant fabulists of Hindu and Buddhist India. This little mare that we are reading has the touch on it of Somadeva, Shahrazad, Taliesin and Boccaccio, as well as the accent of the story-wife of Niederzwehren. If ever there was an art on which the whole community of mankind has worked--seasoned with the philosophy of the codger on the wharf and singing with the music of the spheres--it is this of the ageless tale. The folk tale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.

1. Johannes Bolte and Georg Polivka, Ammerkungen zu den Kinder-und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, Leipzig, 1912-1932, Vol. IV, pp.443-444. To the "story-wife of Niederzwehren" we owe nineteen of the finest tales. Some four years after the brothers had come to know her, she abruptly fell into poverty and sickness, and in another few months had died.*

2. The Wilds were six daughters and one son, the Grimms five sons and one dauther. Frau Wild gave stories 18.30. Lisette gave variants of 41.55.105. Gretchen gave 2.3.154., Dortchen 13.15.24.39.46.49.56.65.88.103.105. parts of 52.55.60. and a variant of 34. Die alte Marie herself supplied 11.26.31.44.50. and a variant of 53.*

3. Ludwig Hassenpflug later married Lotte Grimm. His sisters, Jeannette and Amalie, gave stories 13.14.17.20.29.41.42.53. part of 26. and variants of 61.67.76.*

4. A family of eight sons and six daughters. Their contributions began only after publication of the first edition of volume one (1812), but in the later editions some of their tales replaced earlier numbers.*

5. Deeper meaning lies in the fairytale of my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life. (Die Piccolomini, III.4.)*

6. Richard Cleasby, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, Oxford, 1874, Introduction, p. lxix.*

7. This volume underwent revision for its final edition in 1856. It has recently been wholly renovated, and increased to five sturdy volumes, under the editorship of Professors Johannes Bolte and Georg Polivka (cf. op.cit.).*

8. In German criticism the terms Sage and Legende are commonly distinguished. Sage designates any little, local story, associated with this or that specific hill or grove, pond or river. By a people inhabiting a spirit-haunted and memory-haunted landscape, the Sage is conceived to be a recitation of fact. The Sage may be developed into the Kunstsage, or "Literary Saga." Legende, on the other hand, denotes the religious tale associated with some specific shrine or relic. It is a later and more elaborate form than the Sage. The "Children's Legends" of the Grimm collection bring fairytale motifs to play around elements of Christian belief.--But the term "Legend," as used above, is more general. It includes both Sage and Legende, but also the materials of Chronicle and Epic.*

9. Throughout the Old World, repetition is commonly in threes; in America, fours. *

10. From Bolte and Polivka, op.cit., Vol. IV, p.34.*

11. The literary folk tale can be rendered in either verse or prose. In eighteenth century Germany, Johann Musäus (1735-1787) composed in prose, Christoph Wieland (1735-1813) in verse. The huge Hindu collection of the Kathasaritsagara, "Ocean of the Streams of Story" (c.1063-1081), is entirely in verse; the Arabian Thousand Nights and One Night (eleventh to fifteenth centuries) is in prose. *

12. Some of the Jatakas, or tales of the early lives of the Buddha, are fables that half pretend to be little legends. Buddhist and Jain fables teach religious lore, Aesop and the Brahminical Panchatantra teach the wisdom of life. *

13. A review by Dr. Ruth Benedict will be found in The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, article, "Folklore"; one by Professor William H. Halliday, under the same heading in The Encyclopedia Britannica. A more detailed account with complete bibliography appears in Bolte and Polivka, op.cit., Vol. V, pp.239-264. *

14. Theodor Benfey, Pantschatantra: Fünf Bücher indischer Fabeln, Märchen und Erzählungen. Aus dem Sanskrit überzetzt mit Einleitung und Ammerkungen, Leipzig, 1859. *

15. For examples, see the classification of tales on pp.856. *

16. Magic formulae betraying features of the early Germanic verse-style stand to this day in the Grimm collection:

Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Lass dein Haar herunter (No.12)

Entchen, Entchen,
Da steht Gretel und Haensel
Kein Steg und keine Bruecke
Nimm uns auf deinen weissen Ruecken. (No.15) *

17. How much Hellenistic and Roman material had infected the German tribal mythologies during earlier centuries, before and after the fall of Rome, remains a question; it is certain that much of the Balder and Woden imagery is by no means "primitive Aryan." *

18. The Youth of Siegfried, Brynhild's sleep, the sword in the tree and the broken sword, are motifs adopted from the Celtic tradition. The Icelandic Sagas and Eddas were powerfully influenced by the bards of Ireland. *

20. Friedrich von der Leyen, Das Märchen, Leipzig, 3rd edition, 1925, pp.147-148. *

21. Archer Taylor, The Black Ox Folklore Fellows Communications, Vol. XXIII, No. 70, Helsinki, 1927, p.4. *

22. Adapted from Antti Aarne, Leitfaden der vergleichenden Märchenforschung, FFC., II, 13, 1913, pp.23-29. *

23. The technique was perfected by the Finnish School, but was independently developed by scholars in several quarters. *

24. A second edition, improved and enlarged, appeared in 1849. Translated into German (1852), it came under the eyes of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was inspired to attempt a similar deed in the same meter for the American Indian; result: "The Song of Hiawatha." *

25. Kaarle Krohn, Die folkloristische Arbeitsmethode, Instituttet for Semmenlignende Kulturforskning, Oslo, 1926, pp.13-14. *

26. Ibid., p.13.*

27. Cf. Kaarle Krohn, Bär (Wolf) und Fuchs, Helsingfors, 1888; also, Mann und Fuchs, Helsingfors, 1891. *

28. Antti Aarne, Verzeichnis der Märchentypen, Folklore Fellows Communications, Vol. I, No.3, Helsingfors, 1910. *

29. Walter Anderson, in Lutz Mackensen, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Märchens, Berlin and Leipzig, 1934 ff., Vol. II, article: "Geographisch-historische Methode." *

30. Friedrich von der Leyen, op.cit., p.36. *

31. Müller always stressed descriptions of the sunset and sunrise. Other scholars, following his lead, cogitated on the lunar phases and the interplay of sun and moon, or on the terror of storms and winds, or on the wonder of the stars. *

32. F. Max Müller, op.cit., Vol. II, pp.1-146 ("Comparative Mythology," 1856). *

33. Cf. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, London, 1920, Chapters VIII-X. *

34. "Reflection and enquiry should satisfy us that to our [savage] predecessors we are indebted for much of what we thought most of our own, and that their errors were not wilful extravagances or the ravings of insanity, but simply hypotheses, justifiable as such at the time when they were propounded, but which a further experience has proved to be inadequate. It is only by the successive testing of hypotheses and rejection of the false that truth is at last elicited." (Sir James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, one volume edition, New York and London, 1922, etc., p.264.) *

35. Cf. Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition, 1922. *

36. Emile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris, 1912; English translation, New York and London, 1915, Book I, chapter I; Book II, chapters 5-6. *

37. Hugo Winckler, Himmels-und Weltenbild der Babylonier, als Grundlage der Weltanschauung und Mythologie aller Völker, Leipzig, 1901, p.49--The Babylonian astrological mythology, as described by Winckler, is a local specification, amplication and application of themes that are of the essence of mythology elsewhere. *

38. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "De la 'Mentalité Primitive,'" Etudes traditionelles, 44e Année, Nos. 236-237-238, Paris, 1939, p.278. *

39. Cf. Jaques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, New York, 1930; Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art, Cambridge, Mass., 1934; Heinrich Zimmer, Kunstform und Yoga, Berlin, 1936.*